It was a Wednesday around 8:30 p.m., a week before Thanksgiving, 1958, when I strolled down the third floor corridor of Bancroft Hall towards Ted Bedford’s faculty apartment. He was on duty that night—thus the open door. Jef, one of my fellow preps (what ninth graders were called at Phillips Exeter Academy), had invited me and his roommate, Brink, to spend the holiday break with his family in Salem, Massachusetts. It was the first time I had visited Bedford’s faculty office, a space sealed off in the back foyer of his family living quarters by a mahogany door exactly like the one I lingered just outside of now, in the dorm hallway, an unsigned permission slip from the Dean of Students in hand.

Bedford sat at his desk, facing away from the hall and poring over some papers as I waited for him to notice me. He turned his head towards me with a glance that asked, “What’s up?,” his eyebrows becoming question marks as he peered over his glasses. I handed him the slip and asked him to sign it because my adviser was out of town. Bedford pushed his chair away from his desk and spun to face me, his smile so wide it seemed to touch his sideburns. “Well, I got a deal for you. Before I’ll sign, you must get a haircut.”

Larry I. Palmer is an emeritus professor of law at Cornell University. His professional work has focused on health policy and bioethics, and his published works include Endings and Beginnings: Law, Medicine, and Society in Assisted Life and Death (Praeger, 2000) and Law, Medicine and Social Justice (1989). A previous essay, “Checkerboard Segregation in the 1950 s,” which appeared in Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers ­­Brown v. Board of Education (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), and the essay in this issue of NER are excerpts from a memoir he is currently writing. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

I was born in the Philippines. When I was ten, my family immigrated to the United States, settling in Oakland. My father worked in a factory that made cardboard boxes, my mother worked at a government office. Between them were over a dozen siblings, scattered throughout California: aunts and uncles who were accountants, nurses, telephone company workers, postal service workers. They had all gone to college, but had the immigrant’s understandably practical view of why you went to school, why you went to work, what things you could get from working. Among these aunts and uncles were readers of books and lovers of jazz and opera, and distantly, in past generations of my father’s side of the family, there had been writers. But otherwise life was family, work, and church. Nothing here was a spur or a hindrance to my becoming a writer, and so I went ahead. Because I had gotten good grades all my life, everyone assumed I knew what I was doing with myself—even if, in the years I’m talking about, I always had my eyes averted, I was always a blur at the edges of gatherings and conversations.

And if I knew at some level that poetry was supposed to encompass the whole of who I was, it would be a very long time before I knew what that whole could include. Poetry was this paradox: it invited a largeness of self even as it foreclosed my ability to see myself as anything beyond the poet I desperately wanted to be. Poetry was emotion, it was intense language. It was a tradition, a canon. Poetry for me was a deeply literary identity before I saw it as a space where sociological, social, political, and other elements of identity also converged. Being an immigrant, being gay, having had an ambitious education, having grown up middle class in a liberal, diverse, culturally abundant part of the country—these were real enough facets in the lived life, the way categories of identity could be checked off on an application form. But in the poems I tried to write, these things were abstract, puzzling, barely available and acknowledged resources. I didn’t know how these things could be expressed in my poems, nor did the poems and poets that I loved at the time give sanction for expressing them in the first place. A time would come when I realized those resources were there; but that was much later.

Rick Barot, Poetry Editor of NER, has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, Paris Review, New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Threepenny Review.

Over fifty years ago was the first hearing in the trial of Joseph Brodsky (1940–96), who was, in 1964, a 24-year-old poet and translator at the start of his career. In the Soviet Union, every able-bodied adult was expected to “work”—those who refused risked being criminally charged. The poet Brodsky was, by this logic, accused by Soviet authorities of crimes against the state and found guilty of “social parasitism.” A smuggled copy of Frida Vigdorova’s court transcript, newly translated and annotated here by Michael R. Katz, documented the courage and candor with which Brodsky responded to the Judge, and brought his work to the attention of the West.

First hearing of the case of Joseph Brodsky. Session of the Dzerzhinsky District Court. City of Leningrad. February 18, 1964.

Judge: What do you do for a living?

Brodsky: I write poetry. I translate. I suppose . . .

Judge: Never mind what you “suppose.” Stand up properly. Don’t lean against the wall. Look at the court. Answer the court properly. (To me) Stop taking notes immediately! Or else—I’ll have you thrown out of the courtroom. (To Brodsky) Do you have a regular job?

Brodsky: I thought this was a regular job.

Judge: Answer correctly!

Brodsky: I was writing poems. I thought they’d be published. I suppose . . .

Judge: We’re not interested in what you “suppose.” Tell us why you weren’t working.

Michael R. Katz is C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has written two monographs on Russian literature and has translated a dozen or so Russian novels into English. He was recently named a Mellon Emeritus Fellow and is currently working on a compilation that includes a new translation of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and the recently discovered “counterstories” written in response to it by his wife and son.

To get a couple of things out of the way at the top: Eric Fischl isn’t all that bad, either as a painter or a person. As a smart-ass conceptual artist friend of mine (who has no particular affection for the dauber’s craft) points out, “He can move it around.” But before I get to Fischl’s recent memoir,* this personal anecdote:

My wife, Laurie Fendrich, teaches at a university that, in 2006, organized a symposium about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. She invited Eric Fischl, whose commemorative bronze sculpture, Tumbling Woman, had met with great protests and ultimately a rejection, to participate. He did, for free. The school scheduled several simultaneous sessions, so that the audience for the Fischl panel was much smaller than it should have been, and, moreover, the tech stuff got screwed up so that the artist was unable to project images from his computer. But he took the snafu like a trouper and, afterwards, over a cup of coffee, waxed calm and philosophical about the whole event. A real gentleman, she said.

Peter Plagens is a painter who has shown with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1974 and is also represented by the Texas Gallery in Houston. The staff art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, he now writes for the Wall Street Journal and other publications, including NER. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Arts Journalism Program. His book Bruce Nauman: The True Artist is forthcoming from Phaidon in 2014, and his novel The Art Critic is available from Hol Art Books. Other publications include Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970 (University of California Press, 2000), Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism (UMI Research Press, 1986), and an earlier novel, Time for Robo (Black Heron Press, 1999).